You can download them from Safari and select 'VLC', for one...otherwise you can easily use Finder on Mac to just drag it over to the VLC documents folder on your iPhone - not sure about Windows.
3,366 karma · joined February 1, 2011
nikkigrace at nikkigrace dot ca
Many Blu-Rays are remasters of the originals as well - so, it’s kinda moot with remasters. My point is with the massive quality difference, and that DVD’s in general will only get less worthwhile as time goes on.
Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.
The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.
This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.
It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.
The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.
The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.
Weirdly, almost all of even my much older audio CD’s - stored in the same bin away from heat and moisture - don’t have this issue.
I have to wonder what effect the specifics of the manufacturing process have on how likely a disc is to experience disc rot, as actually even within the SEGA community it’s widely accepted that Saturn discs have an unusually high rate of failure compared to other compact disc collectables.
However - importantly - my original point about quality also applies to backups of these mediums as well - so, assuming any copy of that audio CD has been properly archived and backed up, it will pretty much always be the best quality it can possibly be. Backing up a DVD these days - when there is a majority of the time a superior Blu-Ray or streaming release, is frankly pretty pointless, except for, unusually - the much more abundant amount of special features often found on DVD’s.
I never understood why special features pretty much went the way of the Dodo when Blu-Ray became the standard.
Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio, it doesn’t matter if you play them on the most modern sound systems, they’re still going to sound great.
Streaming allows me to find a nice balance between quality and bandwidth, unfortunately while DVD’s are neat for bonus features, the quality unfortunately makes it rather unpalatable on even semi-modern (1080p) TV’s.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
The password sharing thing is also huge, as due to the insanity of the fragmentation that the ludicrous number of streaming services has caused, a lot of friends and families cope by subscribing to one service apiece and sharing them among each other.
As soon as these little tricks stop working and it becomes more expensive, people will just drop it. It's not like Netflix has actually worked on any value adds recently - tbh I feel their content offerings have gotten so poor recently it's next on the chopping block for me, too.
Also - pardon my ignorance, this may be a dumb question, is SVG universally supported in browsers these days? I’m not big up on image standards.
What really lost me was the hardware. Unfortunately the Pre/Pre 2 was very underpowered and extremely limited in choice of carrier.
There’s a lot of reasons why WebOS never ‘made it’, but I think hardware, for myself - was a huge limitation I could never get past.
Due to licensing, this isn’t possible. So there‘a going to be an infinite amount more days like this.
This hasn’t changed much since the NES days.
That AVGN made his career reviewing - to start - shitty NES games, indicates that the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’, or it’s ‘curation’ - really didn’t matter much.
And it’s not like the NES was alone, even more recently, the Wii was the literal king of shovelware - if you haven’t heard the story of ‘Gingerbread Ninja’ and it’s related clones hilariously sold as different titles, you should check it out.
It’s always been this way. The walls of ‘Walled Gardens’ don’t seem to really hold up to any potential scammer with a ladder. The iOS App Store is filled with scammy garbage copies of legit apps.
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
Even if we kept the original 5% fee, and kept it there - and kicked out the stupid resellers - we’d be making a lot of people happy. It really wouldn’t be hard to whip up something basic. It would be much harder to attract people to it and keep a user base, of course.
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/542366240/fix-your-hearts-or...
There's a lot of cosplay items, etc - Etsy is an incredibly unique market that looks like it needs a replacement with accountability towards it's community.
Sounds like maybe my next project, tbh. :)
I imagine you’ve probably been a software dev for a long time - and come from a history of game dev?
(Ha - yeah - you did. I looked you up, you worked on ‘Bioshock’? It is to my credit that I could figure that out before I looked it up, though.)
You see - unlike the ‘00’s - Unity, and even recent UDK updates, etc - have created a fairy “plug and play” sense of game development that was a fever dream in the ‘90’s, and even most of the ‘00’s.
The tech has changed - the approach has changed, massively.
I mean - hell - even 10 years ago cross-platform shit was a nightmare compared to today. It’s because a lot of that underlying code has been taken care of for 90% of average developers. Only AAA developers need worry about low-level shit.
We are very much living in a design-first era. Which is - frankly - awesome. But it’s so easy to forget that or not see that as primarily a developer.
The interviewer stated they’d laughed and said ‘no, we’re just making video games’. It gave me a giggle, and demonstrates just how advanced these systems were.
Game design - especially in 3D environments - is an incredibly visual process!
Unless you are incredibly familiar with programming to start - why, if you were approaching game design, and - for instance - had level layouts, character and enemy designs, etc - prepared in advance - wouldn't you?
It's literally the most logical way to approach filling in those gaps with functionality with a visual system of design like that.
Also - holy shit, RawTheRapee needs a new/different name, eh? I'm guessing/hoping English is not the creator's first language? :3
Edit: Apparently, it's 'RawTherapee' - as in 'RAW therapy' - not 'Raw the Rape'. It actually took me until Googling it and seeing it that way that I got it. Maybe it should've just been called RawTherapy? :/
There is such a lack of consideration for the average end-user - who would never deal with the layers that come with a Linux distro in the evangelical Linux community - it seriously drives me crazy sometimes.
Like - the only solution? …
There is an entire other OS and ecosystem called MacOS, that doesn’t have these issues like built-in advertising - allows for natively running the proprietary software most people need without some weird translation layer in between - and if you don’t like that - there are ways to tweak Windows into being semi-sorta-not-really-but-whatever level acceptable. It even runs most Linux software, to boot.
Almost like it’s the best of all worlds, or something.
And if you want to bitch about the proprietary hardware ‘needed’ for MacOS - to be frank - in about 15 years or so of playing with both Hackintoshes and various Linux distributions…I honestly found them to be about equal in terms of hardware support and annoyance of configuration.
In the last 4-5 years I’ve actually had better luck with plug and play hardware support on Hackintoshes.
(It’s amazing how fantastic that community is! Most of my computers are totally plug and play. My 80-year-old grandma did it last year, first try - after trying and failing several times with Ubuntu, on her bog-standard Dell tower…)
So, point in case - is the average person supposed to go fishing around for drivers or go out to purchase specific hardware so it works with their Linux distribution?
Do they want to dig through package managers to find whatever alternatives exist to the software they need and already know how to use?
Obviously not, and; no. :P
So is Linux even a ‘solution’ at all for at least 80% of people who don’t even get what a ‘driver’ is? Of course not!
So it certainly can’t be the ‘only’ solution.
Even convincing the average Windows user to go over to MacOS - even if you hand them a Mac - is pretty tough, honestly. (Speaking from experience…)
I’d never, nor have I ever - recommend(ed) any Linux distribution to anyone who wasn’t a serious techie.
Heck, I don’t recommend it in general, unless you’re lucky enough to be a programmer who doesn’t have to work on proprietary systems, and are dual-booting alongside an OS that can natively run the proprietary software 90% of people rely on and already know how to use.
If you’re curious and tech-savvy - of course - go for it!
I’ve recommended dual-booting to a few techie friends, and I have nothing against Linux - honesty except for the people who are blindly evangelical about it and forget about the real people in the world who aren’t techies.
For the average person - Linux is a perfect case of ‘free isn’t free’.
An aside:
You know what is likeliest to replace Windows, which sucks balls? Android. Because honestly, other than the built-in ads, on a default installation, with telemetry enabled, it would be tough to tell which OS is worse for your privacy.
I’d be curious to see a highly technical comparison on that!
It kinda seems like a 'different way for different's sake' kinda solution? :/
I understand there must be a minority of operations that can benefit from this, but overall I can't imagine this being popular for most DB operations.
Actually - it doesn’t. Plain and simple. I actually laughed out loud a little at the comment, ngl.
It’s actually that Linux is controlling me and what I can do. :/ Specifically, what I can’t do.
I’d lose thousands of dollars and years of investment into learning and using these tools I rely on.
It would cripple me completely, professionally - overnight. For real. I’d also lose access to a decade and a half of project files from Logic, etc.
It’s completely privilege if you happen to be in the minority that can find the time and value loss that switching to an OS that doesn’t allow you to run any previous software you’ve used (except Firefox, maybe :P) somehow works for you.
It’s funny - I have complete control over my ability to do everything I want to do on my Mac.
Switching to Linux immediately takes my entire command deck (Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro X, various plug ins, Photoshop, Animator, Maya, Unity3D…I could go on…) away from me.
And what’s funny is - I have the ability to run most of the software I’d run on Linux on my Mac anyway, due to its underpinnings.
Then I’ve still got WINE…
So, the fact is - there are almost only disadvantages for a vast number of, especially average users - to switch to Linux - and most of that is the time and headache involved in unnecessarily learning a new system.
Most people don’t want to even deal with computers to start. And this leads to the biggest reason we will never have the ‘year of Linux’, and the biggest reason I laugh off Linux evangelists as totally ignorant of the ‘real world’.
Us nerds really get stuck in our tiny little corner of a perspective sometimes.
Very little demonstrates that more than Linux switcher evangelists.
The average person literally knows the like 4-5 tasks they need to do on their computer and they don’t want to know or learn anything else! Like, people are not like we are, and any serious Linux evangelist forgot that a long time ago.
If you are privileged enough to be in the extreme minority who can do that - you probably already have.
I know you know this - but people need proprietary software, and they need to not guess if it might possibly work through some interpretative layer like WINE.
May I remind you a lot of people pay for software they need to use, and sometimes need support or updates that they certainly won’t be guaranteed if they are trying to run software on unsupported systems.
If you are somehow privileged enough to not be in that group, you are an extreme - extreme - outlier, and good for you, but don’t bury your head in the sand and forget that for 99% of people, that’s obviously not a possibility - whatsoever - including at least 90% of the workforce who gets handed a laptop and use whatever they have to use.
It’s just so irritating to constantly hear this ‘just go to Linux’ bullshit when it’s not like Linux users aren’t aware that it can’t work for the majority of people.
If I switch to Linux, I lose Photoshop, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Unity, as well as a handful of plug-ins. That’s $1k plus of software I have paid for and rely on, that I instantly lose access to?!
The value loss upon switching to Linux - alone - for most people, who have invested into software ecosystems that can’t be replicated in Linux alone would be astounding.
It’s not even the money spent on software, either - it’s the time invested in learning it.
I know people who run Linux know this - I wonder why they seem to have forgotten.
After dealing with several valuable SEGA Saturn games that succumbed to bit rot, and are therefore worth practically nothing - (nor are they playable, obviously) - I backed up whatever optical disks I had left and have never used optical media since. I certainly never will again.
I just can’t trust it anymore as an investment.
I’ve got vinyl from the 50’s/60’s that still play great but after losing those SEGA games I just see those little plastic disks as ticking time bombs.
Have things changed that wildly in a couple years? If a company dragged me through 6 interviews I’d automatically assume they weren’t serious / were incredibly unorganized or unprofessional - and I would obviously take it as a red flag.
We’ve got maybe half a dozen arcade bars here in Toronto that are so popular lines form out the door virtually every Friday and Saturday night - particularly awesome is the TILT arcade bar around Bathurst and Dundas.
It’s an insane deal, too - $5, taxes in, gets you all you can play for pretty much as long as you’d like to stay there. They have dozens of original arcade cabinets, from fighters to light gun games to a double cabinet Mario Kart that you can do 2P versus on.
They even have booths with retro consoles like N64, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc; so people can play Mario Kart 64, etc. It’s seriously magical.
It’s brought arcades back in a way that I thought I’d never experience again - but now that I’m 32 I can enjoy a beer while my girlfriend and I beat the shit out of each other on a genuine Street Fighter II cabinet.
The cacophony of the arcade is very, very much real at these places, and TILT is one of my favourite date night places in the city. :)
Maybe the trend hasn’t hit your city yet - I know most major cities in the States have similar places - but arcades are not only alive and well, but thriving; and have been given a second lease on life that few dead industries get.